uncanny

i found a great book about uncanny: ‘the uncanny, by mike kelley, artist’. there are 4 articles related to the issue and visuals of the uncanny exhibition. i like christoph grunenberg’s article ‘life in a dead circus’ and especially freud’s aesthetics understanding:

sigmund freud defined uncanny sensations as resulting from “a hidden, familiar thing that has undergone repression and then emerged from it”. (from the cover)

freud defined the uncanny not as belonging to the domain of the psychological but unambigiously as a category of the aesthetic. in his famous treatise on the uncanny, he expilicitly characterises aesthetics as not limited to the “theory of beauty” but also including “the theory of the qualities of feeling”. (page 57)

uncanny : a feeling between pleasure and horroruncanny: originated from the German word ‘unheimlich’